Chapter 21

Akhenaten and Nefertiti the Beautiful

The Ascension of Amenhotop IV to the throne
marked the beginning of the most intriguing and controversial
era of Egyptian history.

Amenhotep IV had been crowned as
co-regent king at least eight years before his father’s death, but
at the beginning of his reign he quickly set about implementing
his radical religious views. His grandfather, Thutmosis IV,
had already hinted at a new emphasis on the worship of the sun
disc Aten, and his father had fostered this by cultivating the
cult of the sun. Akhenaten came right out into the open and
declared his fidelity to Aten in preference to all other Egyptian
deities, though he did not immediately condemn the worship
of Amun.

This bust of Nefertiti was smuggled out of Egypt by German archaeologists who were
excavating at Tel el Amarna and is now in the Berlin Museum. Nefertiti means “The beautiful
one has come.”

However, he soon showed his hostility for Amun. Even before his father’s death,
probably in the fourth year of his co-regency, he changed his name from Amenhotep,
meaning “Amun is satisfied,” to Akhenaten, probably meaning “of service to Aten.” To
get right away from the influences of the priests of Amun at Luxor, he decided to build
a new capital city. Halfway between Luxor and Memphis, he selected a plain, with the
Nile on one side and a semi-circle of hills on the east side, and called it Akhetaten,
meaning “horizon of the Aten.” He moved his whole court there two years later.

It was a magnificent, well-laid out city with a palace and temple, public gardens,
a sacred lake, and neat private houses. The site is now known as Tel el Amarna. The
new city was built quickly and was dedicated in year six. By year nine, the city was
fully functional.

His father must have approved the move, no doubt encouraged by his name being
deified, and the persecution of the god Amun was launched. Temples were destroyed,
inscriptions were altered or defaced, and statues smashed. The name “Amen” was
even chiseled out of his father’s name inscribed on a capital of Amenhotep’s temple
at Luxor.

Akhenaten’s statue depicts
him as having pinched cheeks,
a distended belly, and thick
legs. This was probably an art
style rather than a physical
abnormality.

Akhenaten’s statues depict him as rather grotesque
with an elongated head, thick lips, pinched cheeks, protruding
abdomen, and thick thighs. Is that what he really
looked like or was this a new art form? Advocates of the
former theory endeavor to identify his deformity as Marfan’s
syndrome, an inherited disorder caused by a defective
gene. However, their arguments are not convincing, and
they do not explain why his family and even courtiers are
depicted with similar features.

Others have suggested that he was a victim of Frolich’s
syndrome, but this abnormality results in impotence, and
Akhenaten fathered six daughters. It is not realistic to explain
this away by saying that some other male fathered
his wife Nefertiti’s children. Nefertiti might have gotten
away with it once, but not six times

In favor of the art form theory is the fact that he
himself was into art. His chief sculptor, Bek, wrote that
Akhenaten taught him style and technique. There is no
doubt that Akhenaten was a brilliant scholar and had an
innovative mind. He was one of the few pharaohs who
could write the complicated hieroglyphic script, and he
wrote some beautiful hymns to Aten.

Houses for the aristocracy at the new city of Akhetaten were well built
and comfortable.

One interesting feature of Amarna art is the depiction
of people with a right and left hand. Before and after that,
it was customary to depict people with two left hands.
The Amarna artists only mastered the distinction between
left and right hands and feet some time between years six
and nine of Akhenaten's reign, and even then it was only
applied to royalty. Other citizens had to manage with two
left hands and two left feet.

Akhenaten possessed many good qualities. No doubt,
he had the wrong religion, but it was a vast improvement
on the existing religion with its ridiculous worship of
anything that walked, flew, or crawled. He was a man of
convictions who was ready to defy tradition to pursue his
religious beliefs. He appears as a kindly family man who
loved his wife and children.

Theirs was apparently a devoted marriage. The fact
that Nefertiti bore him six daughters and no sons did not
seem to diminish his affection for her. So many reliefs
show them as a close and affectionate family. The king
wrote, “My heart is pleased with the queen and her
children. May old age be granted to the Great Queen
Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti. . . . And may old age be granted
to her children.”1

The painted floor of Akhenaten’s palace at Akhetaten is now in the
Cairo Museum.

It was not to be. By year 12 of their reign only three
of their daughters are depicted in reliefs, implying that
three had tragically met an early death.

Akhenaten is often shown as a loving family man,
dandling daughters on his knees. There is one statue in
the Cairo Museum with his daughter Meritaton on his
knees, and he is affectionately kissing her on the lips. Of
course this can be construed as more than fatherly love,
because he finished up by marrying two of his daughters,
Meritaton and Ankhesenpaten. He also had other wives
in his harem.

Year 12 is the last time the royal family is depicted
being together. Does this mean a break-up in family relationships,
a new art style, or the death of Nefertiti? All
that can be said is that this was a year of lavish celebrations.
Ambassadors and governors of foreign countries
were summoned to appear, but the purpose of the ceremonies
remains a mystery.

Remains of Nefertiti’s special palace at the north end of the city of Akhetaten.

He has been called by some as the first monotheist of
history. That claim can no longer be supported, because
the revised chronology would place him at a later time
than Moses. If anyone copied anyone, it was Akhenaten
who emulated the teachings of Moses, but there is no evidence
to prove that any copying was involved, and recent
scholarship has shown that he was not really a monotheist.
He certainly was hostile to Amun and relentlessly opposed
his worship, but he still condoned the worship of
Osiris.

Rolf Krauss, writing in The Bulletin of the Australian
Centre for Egyptology, admits that Akhenaten was devoted
to the sun disc Aten, and that he had it in for the sun god
Amun, but insists that he was not a monotheist. Krauss
takes scholars to task for not pointing out that while
Akhenaten was obviously out to destroy the god Amun,
there were other gods who were not the object of his
wrath. He claims that they well knew this, but in order to
promote the idea of monotheism, they deliberately chose
to ignore evidence to the contrary.2

Akhenaten was a family man, shown in this statue kissing his
daughter Meritaton on the lips.

One scene originally showed Akhenaten’s father,
Amun, and the goddess Hathor. Her image, like those of
most other gods and goddesses in Amenhotep III’s memorial
temple, was not attacked during Akhenaten’s religious
purge. Krauss wrote, “The conclusion seems inescapable
that Akhenaten recognized Ptah-Sokar-Osiris as a god—a god for whom he may have shown no great personal
interest, but whom he evidently found acceptable in the
context of the funerary cult of his father.”3

Then there was the exaltation of the cobra. Most pharaohs
had the cobra on the front of their crowns, ready
to strike at their enemies. At Amarna, excavators found
many clay figures of cobras. Krauss reasons that their
“presence show that the inhabitants of Amarna worshiped
these cobras and gave offerings to them.”

In his accusations Krauss seems to suggest that religious
bias had something to do with what he sees as a bit
of a cover-up.

“Specialists were also aware of the fact that
Akhenaten tolerated other Egyptian gods. But European
and North American scholars were prejudiced. They lived
and thought within a monotheistic cultural and religious
framework, and they seem to have been eager to recognize
the basic monotheistic ideas of their own Judeo-Christian
heritage in Akhenaten’s sun cult.”4

Hundreds of cuneiform tablets were found at Tel el Amarna. They were used for correspondence between the pharaoh
and his subjects in Asia.

Krauss undoubtedly has a point about Akhenaten’s
polytheism, but it should be observed that it was not
the proponents of Christianity who made the comparisons
about monotheism; it was the critics of the Bible.
They gleefully pointed out that Moses did not originate
the concept of monotheism. He got it from Akhenaten.
They were working on the assumption that Akhenaten
preceded Moses.

Some scholars parrot the idea that David, in Psalm (104), copied Akhenaten’s hymn to the Aten. In the first
place, by a revised chronology, Akhenaten would have
been later than King David, so if anyone copied anyone,
it would be Akhenaten that copied David; but second,
the similarities are grossly exaggerated, and there is one
major difference. Whereas David ascribes the existence of
the sun to the power of God, Akhenaten regarded the sun
itself as the god. He wrote, “Glorious, you rise on the
horizon of heaven, O living Aten, creator of life. . . . You
created the world.”5 Contrast this with “O Lord my God,
you are very great: you are clothed with honor and majesty,
who cover yourself with light as with a garment, who
stretched out the heavens like a curtain” (Psalm 104:1–2). It
is absurd to say that David copied Akhenaten’s hymn.

Sunset over the Nile at Tel el Amarna where Akhenaten built his new city.

Many differing tales have been told as to how the bust
finished up in Berlin. There can be no doubt that it was
smuggled out of Egypt, but whether by a bizarre deception,
or a careless oversight by an Egyptian authority is
open to question.

The German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt was the
one who was in charge of the excavations at Tel el Amarna
when the beautiful bust of Nefertiti was found. The
Germans were given authority to commence excavations
at Tel el Amarna in 1907, but did no serious digging until
1911. In 1912, the team came across the workshop of the
sculptor Djhutymes and found a number of unfinished
stone heads and busts of Amarna royals and also a large
number of plaster masks. Then on December 6 came the
sensational discovery of the head of Nefertiti, the most
beautiful statue that has ever been found in Egypt.

On the cliffs bordering Akhenaten’s new city was a copy of
Akhenaten’s hymn to Aten.

The discoveries were spectacular, but the Germans
were not about to give that impression to Gaston Maspero,
the French head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service
at that time. Borchardt wrote to Maspero and invited him
to come to Amarna to sort out the finds which, he casually
said, were not very remarkable. Maspero swallowed the
story and sent an Egyptian deputy for the occasion. The
deputy selected a few heads for the Egyptian Museum and
authorized the rest of the discoveries, labeled “baskets of
clay shards and many limestone fragments,” to be shipped
out of the country, and Nefertiti sailed for Berlin.

Very prudently, the Germans kept Nefertiti under
wraps until 1924. They hinted that the 1914–1918 war
had delayed the announcement of the great discovery,
but more likely it was apprehension over the reaction that
they expected. Sure enough, when Nefertiti went on display,
the Egyptian authorities sent up a justifiable howl of
protest, demanding that Nefertiti be returned to Egypt.

Borchardt asserted that he had an agreement with
Maspero, allowing the Germans to take the statue to
Berlin. Fortunately for Borchardt, Maspero had died
in 1916, so it was his word against the rest, but as the
saying goes, possession is nine-tenths of the law; Nefertiti
is still in Berlin. The Egyptians were justifiably annoyed
and vented their feelings by excluding Germans from
excavating in Egypt for an indefinite period. That ban
has now been lifted, and Germans are working in several
sites, but the Egyptians are still demanding the return of
Nefertiti.

An unfinished head of Nefertiti. Joanne Fletcher claimed that the
female mummy found in the tomb of Amenhotep II was the body of
Queen Nefertiti. Most archaeologists have rejected this claim.

Of course, there is still speculation as to whether
Nefertiti was really that beautiful—or if she just had a good
sculptor. Her name means “The beautiful one has come,”
and at least her husband thought she was outstandingly
beautiful. On his boundary stela he wrote, “Fair of face,
joyous with the double plume, mistress of happiness, endowed
with favor, at hearing whose voice one rejoices,
lady of grace, great of love, whose disposition cheers the
lord of the two lands.”6

There is a large statue in the Cairo Museum which
has provoked much speculation. There is no name on
the statue, but it is generally assumed to have been of
Akhenaten, and it depicts him without any clothes on—and without something else. Some have concluded from
this that Akhenaten was impotent, but as we have already
mentioned that would seem unlikely.

Suggestions have ranged from Akhenaten being a homosexual
to the idea that someone may have knocked it
off for a doorstop. Joyce Tyldesley asserts that the statue
was unfinished and would have eventually been carved or
painted to show the kilt. Joyce herself did not seem to be
very convinced by her own argument because she finishes
up by saying that it may, after all, have been a statue of
Nefertiti.

Portion of the palace of Nefertiti at Tel el Amarna.

Others have suggested it denotes that in later years
he became the female partner in a homosexual relationship,
and someone even suggested that he was a female
pharaoh. None of these ideas can be supported by solid
evidence.

Something dramatic seems to have happened at
Akhetaten. Nefertiti suddenly disappears from the records.
Does this imply her early death, as some have suggested,
or that she fell into disgrace and was removed from
office. In support of this idea it has been pointed out that
she had a palace at the opposite end of the city to which
she may have been banished, but if she fell into disfavor, is
it likely that the king would build a special palace for her?
Pharaohs had ways of disposing of rejected wives without
building magnificent palaces for them.

In contrast to this theory is the speculation that
she was not just the power behind the throne, she was
the monarch on the throne. Tiye had achieved almost
equality with Amenhotep III. Nefertiti almost seemed
to surpass her husband in political importance. Broken
blocks recovered from one of his temples that had been
demolished after his death reveal an imbalance in pictorial
prominence in favor of Nefertitti.

On this barren plain at Tel el Amarna once stood Akhenaten’s resplendent new city of Akhetaten. The building materials were subsequently taken for
buildings elsewhere.

In the blocks so far analyzed there were 329 occurrences
of the figure or name of the king, but 564 of Nefertiti’s
name or image. Analysis of more blocks may redress
this imbalance, but it is obvious that Nefertiti wielded an
enormous amount of power and prominence compared
with previous queens.

What is even more unprecedented is the depiction of
Nefertiti in “a smiting role.” One relief shows her with
club upraised about to bash the brains out of a female
captive. Whether Nefertiti ever performed such a murderous
act, or whether this was just a stereotyped pharaonic
method of depicting power, is anyone’s guess. One thing
seems sure: she was equal with the male ruler.

There is no inscriptional record of Nefertiti’s death,
so what really happened? Did she die? Was she killed? Did
she fall into disgrace? Or did she become the pharaoh on
Akhenaten’s death? If the latter, Nefertiti would have become
a divine being, but there is no firm evidence for
that. Some have tried to recognize a compromise between
divinity and humanity in the queen, but as Joyce Tyldesley
says, “The idea that one could be semi-divine seems
very similar to the old joke of a naïve girl claiming to be
just a little bit pregnant.”7

A statue of Akhenaten now in the Cairo Museum.

One of the most intriguing questions about Nefertiti
is her missing eye. Her left eye is there, but it has no features.
Did the sculptor never get around to finishing the
face? Did some enemy mutilate it? Was she really blind
in that eye? Maybe the artist simply used it as an artist’s
model to allow students to study techniques.

Akhenaten was not a warrior pharaoh, but he was a
political diplomat. In 1887, a sensational discovery was
made at Tel el Amarna. Some clay tablets with cuneiform
writing were discovered. At first they were dubbed
a forgery. Everyone knew that the script of Egypt was
hieroglyphic, but then it was realized that this was from
Akhenaten’s archives and consisted of correspondence
between the Egyptian court and Egypt’s subjects and allies
in foreign countries. Altogether, there were some 358
such tablets, but because they were initially regarded as
frauds, most of them have been lost.

Most books claim that Akhenaten was so preoccupied
with his religious reforms that these pleas for help fell on
deaf ears, but they actually reveal a lively correspondence
between the pharaoh and his allies. They are mostly from
the time of Amenhotep III and his son Akhenaten.

When the Amarna Period ended, the temples to the Aten were
demolished. Thousands of blocks of stone called talatat have been collected
by archaeologists who are trying to put them together again.

Most scholars have tried to fit these letters into the
conventional chronology, about 1410 to 1370 B.C., but
they fit better into the revised chronology, which would
place them about 870–840 B.C. There were 60 letters
from the king of Sumur. It would be ridiculous to identify
him as the king of the Sumerians who lived far away
in southern Iraq. It is more logical to identify him as the
king of Samaria, but the problem for the traditionalists is
that Samaria, the capital of the ten tribes of Israel, was not
founded until King Omri purchased the hill on which it
was built in the ninth century B.C. (1 Kings 16:23–24).

A surface reading of the biblical record seems to present
Israel as an independent nation, but it is significant
that Samaria had a governor named Amon (1 Kings 22:26), and Amon is a typically Egyptian name. He is
called Aman-appa in the Amarna letter number 73. Letters
74 and 85 speak of a famine in Sumur, and there was
such a severe famine in the days of King Ahab (1 Kings
18:2).

Unfortunately, there is hardly anything left of Akhenaten’s
beautiful city. After his death it was abandoned, and
Egypt returned to the worship of the god Amun and all
the tributary gods. The stones of the city were pillaged for
buildings by later pharaohs, and little remains of the palaces
of Akhenaten and Nefertiti for tourists to see.

Unwrapping the Pharaohs

Adults and children alike are fascinated by Egyptian civilization. But most modern archaeologists have lately tried to use Egyptian chronology to dispute the biblical record. Secular textbooks and videos challenge the faith of students and discredit the biblical account of Exodus. Those who wish to defend the accuracy of the Bible now have an incredible tool in this exciting book that provides compelling confirmation of the biblical account.

Newsletter

Thank You!

Thank you for signing up to receive email newsletters from Answers in Genesis.

Whoops!

Your newsletter signup did not work out. Please refresh the page and try again.

Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively. We focus on providing answers to questions about the Bible—particularly the book of Genesis—regarding key issues such as creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth.